Category: General Linux

Penguicon 2015 was a great success, and far more happened than I could have been part of. We had about 500 hours of programming, and even my track, the Tech Track, had 100 hours of content. So this report is my own diary of my particular experience of Penguicon 2015. Each person would have their …

The KDE project has released its Manifesto. Since this is my desktop of choice, I thought I should mention it. It is very good: The KDE Manifesto We are a community of technologists, designers, writers and advocates who work to ensure freedom for all people through our software. Because of this work we have come …

A few weeks back there was a small tempest-in-a-teacup when Linux Action Show invited Richard Stallman (RMS) on to their show, and were astonished that he refused to compromise his views. This led Bryan Lunduke to accuse Stallman of wanting to starve the Lunduke family since he would not give his imprimatur to Mr. Lunduke …

I started this particular series of posts on January 5th, and now I am going to finish it on March 4th, so it has been just 2 months. In that time we have explored some of the ways everyone can support Free Software, such a by filing bugs, writing documentation, and by providing financial support. …

And by that I mean Money. As I mentioned previously, when we talk about Free Software, the emphasis ought to be on freedom, not on price. The fact that so much Free Software is also free of purchase is great. It offers people who cannot afford expensive proprietary software a chance to use comparable software …

In my day job I am a Project Manager, and one of the things I constantly try to get is good documentation. I hope I have even produced a little of it myself. But there is no topic on which I get more resistance than on creating good documentation. No one ever has time to …

In a previous post I mentioned that Free Software should more properly be considered “Community-Supported” software, and I said I would come back to discuss just what that means. There are lots of ways for someone to support Free Software, but one of the most important is by submitting bugs to the developers. Remember that …

Well, I just installed OpenSuse 12.1 on one of my computers. Another one of my New Year’s resolutions was to try some other distros. I picked OpenSuse because it is a KDE distro, and I definitely prefer KDE. I am hoping to find that RPM is better than it used to be. So far, YAST …

The words we use to describe what we do can matter a lot in how we in the FOSS community think about what we do. Once upon a time there was Free Software, as defined by Richard Stallman in the famous Four Freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The …

Or Why Tim Cook may be the world’s unluckiest man Please understand that I don’t wish anything bad to Tim Cook. I’ve never met the man. But I am observing something about the market dynamics in the smartphone and tablet market that I have not yet seen anyone else talk about. Eric Raymond in his …